Setting up PHP development environment for your Team
If you are a individual developer you can install ampp in your desktop and develop application individually. But when it comes to team development we stuck with many things. Here the few solutions .Install Following tools on individual machines
IDE: Net Beans PHP
Netbeans is the Free and official IDE for JAVA. The PHP variant is available for downlaod from netbeans website . It provides refactoring, code formating , Framework Ready and most importantly smart code completion. Its a life saver for Test Driven Development
Quick Editor: NotePad++
We cant open netbeans for all the times to edit small stuff since it will take time to load. So for instant editing use Notepad++ which is powerful for editing any language. We can also install plugins specific for PHP developement, FTP and so on.
HTML Editor: Microsoft Expression Web
Microsoft expression web was discontinued by MS and made available to free for public. Its a powerful tool and great alternative for Dreamweaver. We can setup site and publish them directly and edit files. It supports DWT and WYSIWYG. Which will help for designers either in production or HTML Pro-typing.
SVN Client: Tortoise SVN
Tortoise SVN makes it easy to collaborate even with a fresher. No shell commands required . mainlining your source code will become easy with this tool
FTP CLient: WINSCP / Filezilla
Filezilla is simple FTP client and if you integrate Notepad++ as editor it will be fine to work on live files. There are several other ways to do it like MS expression web inbuilt FTP, Netbeans remote site setup or even just with notepad++ ftp plugin. For advanced solution use Winscp which is powerful and can be connected even to servers without FTP server using shell login . Can be used with cloud servers like AWS
File Comparison : Win-merge
When that yuck moment you see SVN conflict, this tool will be your best pal to resolve it. Apart from that you can generate patch files.
Local web server Stack : Xampp / Ampps
Ampps takes advantage with xampp due to its components like mongoDb, SQL lite manager, python support. You can switch them based on your project requirement. Also when your UI developers working on PHP files They may not need all this components. PHP5.4 Comes with inbuilt server
Project Management Tool
Redmine:
Redmine(www.redmine.org/) is an opensource project management system build on Ruby on Rails (rubyonrails.org). Its easy to add issues and track. If you try to install it with shell you must be a expert and need to spend lot of time
So simply download the Bitnami Stack( https://bitnami.com/stack/redmine )and install it on one of your machine which can be used for a individual developer using the same stack. Since the stack comes with PHP RUBY MYSQL SubVERSION. we can use the same server for svn repository . But we should use shell and lot of time again to configure.
Alternative for redmine:
There are several Redmine alternatives built with PHP itself available like MANTIS (https://www.mantisbt.org). Recently found ‘Celestic’ (http://qbit.com.mx/labs/celestic/ )Build on our favourite YII framework. It looks promising and as a developer we can customise it as we wish which we cant do with Redmine.
SVN Server:
As told earlier we could use the redmine stack to have the repository with USVN an opensource SVN repository management system. But if we need a turnkey SVN solution just download Visual SVN (http://www.visualsvn.com/) . Install it on another machine . Before installing it you can rename the system for your convenience like {SVNserver} since the application will create Virtual Host based on the system name. So your adminsitrator URL will look like http://svnserver/. Then create a repository and try to put get files from other Sytems with Tortoise SVN
An update posted on following link : PHP development tools for 2016 – http://infario.com/blog/php-development-tools-for-2016/
